Dianne Parker | The University of Manchester (original) (raw)

Papers by Dianne Parker

Transportation Research Part F-traffic Psychology and Behaviour, Dec 1, 2002

... The second group of items referred to the driver's reaction to getting a traffic ticket.... more ... The second group of items referred to the driver's reaction to getting a traffic ticket. The potential responses range from compliance: 'After receiving a traffic ticket, I would just pay it as requested' to extreme deviant behaviour: 'After receiving a traffic ticket, I would ignore it'. ...

BMJ Quality & Safety, 2013

Background The measurement of safety culture in healthcare is generally regarded as a first step ... more Background The measurement of safety culture in healthcare is generally regarded as a first step towards improvement. Based on a selfassessment of safety culture, the Frankfurt Patient Safety Matrix (FraTrix) aims to enable healthcare teams to improve safety culture in their organisations. In this study we assessed the effects of FraTrix on safety culture in general practice. Methods We conducted an open randomised controlled trial in 60 general practices. FraTrix was applied over a period of 9 months during three facilitated team sessions in intervention practices. At baseline and after 12 months, scores were allocated for safety culture as expressed in practice structure and processes (indicators), in safety climate and in patient safety incident reporting. The primary outcome was the indicator error management. Results During the team sessions, practice teams reflected on their safety culture and decided on about 10 actions per practice to improve it. After 12 months, no significant differences were found between intervention and control groups in terms of error management (competing probability=0.48, 95% CI 0.34 to 0.63, p=0.823), 11 further patient safety culture indicators and safety climate scales. Intervention practices showed better reporting of patient safety incidents, reflected in a higher number of incident reports (mean (SD) 4.85 (4.94) vs 3.10 (5.42), p=0.045) and incident reports of higher quality (scoring 2.27 (1.93) vs 1.49 (1.67), p=0.038) than control practices. Conclusions Applied as a team-based instrument to assess safety culture, FraTrix did not lead to measurable improvements in error management. Comparable studies with more positive results had less robust study designs. In future research, validated combined methods to measure safety culture will be required. In addition, more attention should be paid to evaluation of process parameters. Implemented actions and incident reporting may be more appropriate target endpoints. Trial registration German Clinical Trials Register (Deutsches Register Klinischer Studien, DRKS) No. DRKS00000145

Quality and Safety in Health Care, 2002

Background: Learning from mistakes is key to maintaining and improving the quality of care in the... more Background: Learning from mistakes is key to maintaining and improving the quality of care in the NHS. This study investigates the willingness of healthcare professionals to report the mistakes of others. Methods: The questionnaire used in this research included nine short scenarios describing either a violation of a protocol, compliance with a protocol, or improvisation (where no protocol exists). By developing different versions of the questionnaire, each scenario was presented with a good, poor, or bad outcome for the patient. The participants (n=315) were doctors, nurses, and midwives from three English NHS trusts who volunteered to take part in the study and represented 53% of those originally contacted. Participants were asked to indicate how likely they were to report the incident described in each scenario to a senior member of staff. Results: The findings of this study suggest that healthcare professionals, particularly doctors, are reluctant to report adverse events to a superior. The results show that healthcare professionals, as might be expected, are most likely to report an incident to a colleague when things go wrong (F(2,520) = 82.01, p<0.001). The reporting of incidents to a senior member of staff is also more likely, irrespective of outcome for the patient, when the incident involves the violation of a protocol (F(2,520) = 198.77, p<0.001. It appears that, although the reporting of an incident to a senior member of staff is generally not very likely, particularly among doctors, it is most likely when the incident represents the violation of a protocol with a bad outcome. Conclusions: An alternative means of organisational learning that relies on the identification of system (latent) failures before, rather than after, an adverse event is proposed.

BMC Health Services Research, Sep 7, 2009

Background: While much research has been conducted on medication safety, few of these studies hav... more Background: While much research has been conducted on medication safety, few of these studies have addressed primary care, despite the high volume of prescribing and dispensing of medicines that occurs in this setting. Those studies that have examined primary care dispensing emphasised the need to understand the role of sociotechnical factors (that is, the interactions between people, tasks, equipment and organisational structures) in promoting or preventing medication incidents. The aim of this study was to identify sociotechnical factors that community pharmacy staff encounter in practice, and suggest how these factors might impact on medication safety. Methods: Sixty-seven practitioners, working in the North West of England, took part in ten focus groups on risk management in community pharmacy. The data obtained from these groups was subjected to a qualitative analysis to identify recurrent themes pertaining to sociotechnical aspects of medication safety. Results: The findings indicated several characteristics of participants' work settings that were potentially related to medication safety. These were broadly classified as relationships involving the pharmacist, demands on the pharmacist and management and governance of pharmacists. Conclusion: It is recommended that the issues raised in this study be considered in future work examining medication safety in primary care.

BJA: British Journal of Anaesthesia, Jun 1, 2009

Background. With the proliferation of practice guidelines in anaesthesia comes the possibility th... more Background. With the proliferation of practice guidelines in anaesthesia comes the possibility that anaesthetists may, during the course of their work, commit 'violations' (actions that are not intended to cause harm to patients, but that deviate from guidelines). These may have a long-term impact on patient safety, and so there is a need to understand what makes anaesthetists decide to follow or deviate from guidelines. Methods. A questionnaire on the use of guidelines was completed by 629 College Fellows. This presented three anaesthetic scenarios, each of which involved a deviation from a guideline, and asked respondents to rate their beliefs about the likely outcome of the violation, the level of social approval they would have for violating, the amount of control they would have over violating, and the practice of their peers with regard to violating. Results. In all three scenarios, beliefs about the outcome of violating and the amount of control over violating predicted respondents' self-reported likelihood that they would commit the violation. In two scenarios, beliefs about the practice of peers predicted violating. Level of social approval predicted violating in one scenario only. Conclusions. Anaesthetists' decisions to follow or deviate from guidelines are influenced by the beliefs they hold about the consequences of their actions, the direct or indirect influence of others, and the presence of factors that encourage or facilitate particular courses of action.

Psychology Health & Medicine, Jan 19, 2016

Healthcare practitioners' fitness to practise has often been linked to their personal and demogra... more Healthcare practitioners' fitness to practise has often been linked to their personal and demographic characteristics. It is possible that situational factors, such as the work environment and physical or psychological well-being, also have an influence on an individual's fitness to practise. However, it is unclear how these factors might be linked to behaviours that risk compromising fitness to practise. The aim of this study was to examine the association between job characteristics, well-being and behaviour reflecting risky practice amongst a sample of registered pharmacists in a region of the United Kingdom. Data were obtained from a cross-sectional self-report survey of 517 pharmacists. These data were subjected to principal component analysis and path analysis, with job characteristics (demand, autonomy and feedback) and well-being (distress and perceived competence) as the predictors and behaviour as the outcome variable. Two aspects of behaviour were found: overloading (taking on more work than one can comfortably manage) and risk taking (working at or beyond boundaries of safe practice). Separate path models including either job characteristics or well-being as independent variables provided a good fit to the dataset. Of the job characteristics, demand had the strongest association with behaviour, while the association between well-being and risky behaviour differed according to the aspect of behaviour being assessed. The findings suggest that, in general terms, situational factors should be considered alongside personal factors when assessing, judging or remediating fitness to practise. They also suggest the presence of different facets to the relationship between job characteristics, well-being and risky behaviour amongst pharmacists.

International Journal of Pharmacy Practice, Jun 14, 2011

Objective. To establish whether there are any characteristics of pharmacists that predict their l... more Objective. To establish whether there are any characteristics of pharmacists that predict their likelihood of being subjected to disciplinary action. Setting. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain's Disciplinary Committee. Method. One hundred and seventeen pharmacists, all of whom had been referred to the Disciplinary Committee, were matched with a quota sample of 580 pharmacists who had not been subjected to disciplinary action but that matched the disciplined pharmacists on a set of demographic factors (gender; country of residence; year of registration). Frequency analysis and regression analysis were used to compare the two groups of pharmacists in terms of sector of work, ethnicity, age and country of training. Descriptive statistics were also obtained from the disciplined pharmacists to further explore characteristics of disciplinary cases and those pharmacists who undergo them. Key findings. While a number of characteristics appeared to increase the likelihood of a pharmacist being referred to the disciplinary committee, only one of these-working in a community pharmacy-was statistically significant. Professional misconduct accounted for a greater proportion of referrals than did clinical malpractice, and approximately one-fifth of pharmacists who went before the DC had previously been disciplined by the Society. Conclusions. This study provides initial evidence of pharmacist characteristics that are associated with an increased risk of being disciplined, based upon the data currently available. It is recommended that follow-up work is carried out using a more extensive dataset in order to confirm the statistical trends identified here.

Cognition, Technology & Work, May 23, 2014

As a widely recognised feature of work activity, procedural violations have been of considerable ... more As a widely recognised feature of work activity, procedural violations have been of considerable interest to human factors specialists, and several models have been proposed to aid in understanding their occurrence. A common feature of these models is that they depict violations as being, to a greater or lesser extent, intentional; therefore, rule-related behaviour could be reconceptualised as an exercise in decision making. In this paper, we examine anaesthetists' use of rules from the perspective of naturalistic decision making (NDM). Doing so suggests that their rule-related behaviour is a product of the extent to which following a rule is consistent with other principles that guide their decision making. Observational and interview data from 23 consultant anaesthetists indicated the presence of three such principles: "doing the right thing"; "doing what works in the circumstances"; and "using one's skills and expertise". Hence, rule-related behaviour in this setting is better understood as a form of situated action than as the following or breaking of rules per se. We discuss the implications of this view for understanding why violations occur, and how to address them.

British Journal of Psychology, Aug 1, 2007

In two studies the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) including moral norms, anticipated regret an... more In two studies the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) including moral norms, anticipated regret and past behaviour was applied to predicting intention to exceed the posted speed limit across different roads and objectively assessed speeding behaviour. All measures except behaviour were taken by self‐report questionnaires referring to different driving scenarios. The behaviour measures were based on performance in a simulator (Study 1) or unobtrusive on‐road speed camera assessment taken without driver awareness (Study 2) across roads with varying posted speed limits. Results are reported averaged across road types in both studies. In Study 1 (N = 83), 82% of the variance in intentions to speed was explained, with attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control (PBC), moral norms, anticipated regret and past behaviour being significant predictors. A total of 35% of the variance in speed as assessed on a driving simulator was accounted for with intentions, PBC, moral norms and previous accidents being significant predictors. In Study 2 (N = 303), 76% of the variance in intentions to speed was explained with attitudes, moral norms, anticipated regret and past behaviour being significant predictors. A total of 17% of the variance in speed as assessed on‐road was accounted for with intentions and moral norms being significant. Practical implications of the findings for road safety are discussed.

British Journal of Social Psychology, Jun 1, 1995

The research reported here considers the role of attitudes, norms and control in transport mode c... more The research reported here considers the role of attitudes, norms and control in transport mode choice, specifically attempts to reduce car use through individualised marketing campaigns. Much work to reduce car use focuses on the provision of information. Often, this information is concerned with persuading people of the need to reduce car use, and increasing their awareness of the alternatives available. It is hoped that the information provided will change individuals' attitudes towards car use and the use of alternatives, and thus cause them to reduce their car use (i.e., change their behaviour). The most sophisticated projects will tailor information so that it is personally relevant to individuals and specific journeys for which it is feasible to use an alternative to the car. Few projects are explicitly structured around a theory of behaviour or how to change behaviour, although the idea that attitudes are fundamental is often implicit. That is to say, the idea that to change behaviour, you need to change attitudes is central. However, theories of behaviour, e.g. Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), indicate that other factors in addition to attitudes inform behaviour. The TPB suggests that behaviour is in fact the result of relevant intentions, and is not directly influenced by attitudes. The TPB suggests that these intentions are formed from a combination of attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control (PBC). Research that specifically tested the TPB in relation to reducing car use, supports the idea that PBC and norms can be significant in relation to reducing car use. Additionally, the research suggested that attitudes were not always significant to actual change when the fact that car use has negative impacts is already accepted. The results of the research are presented and the consequences for TPB operationalisation in the context of reducing car use are discussed. The potential role of personal norms is also considered.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TRAFFIC AND TRANSPORT PSYCHOLOGY - ICTTP 2000, HELD 4-7 SEPTEMBER 2000, BERNE, SWITZERLAND - KEYNOTES, SYMPOSIA, THEMATIC SESSIONS, WORKSHOPS, POSTERS, LIST OF PARTICIPANTS AND WORD VIEWER - CD ROM, 2001

Driving is a technical skill undertaken in a social context that affords expressive opportunities... more Driving is a technical skill undertaken in a social context that affords expressive opportunities. Theories of driver behaviour need to account for why, where, when, what and how people drive. Levels of analysis include consideration of the social influences that sustain the culture of automobility; the network of travel and transport obligations that help define individual's activity patterns; the deviations from reference driving behaviour - violations - that partly constitute their driving style; and the system characteristics that promote or constrain cognitive failures - errors. This paper describes an attempt to incorporate some of these factors into a descriptive model of person and system influences on crash-involvement. For the covering abstract see ITRD E113725.

This report describes a series of studies investigating the usefulness of a range of strategies i... more This report describes a series of studies investigating the usefulness of a range of strategies in attempting to change drivers' attitudes towards speeding, and a selection of other driving violations. The first study showed that measurable attitude change could be achieved by having recipients think seriously about the content of an anti-speeding message containing strong arguments. A further study showed that the inclusion of information about the prevalence of the speeding in the general population increased the effectiveness of the anti-speeding message, whether the information given was accurate or not. A third study developed previous research using Ajzen's (1985) theory of planned behaviour, by applying an extended version of the model to intentions to commit lane-discipline violations. Together with the earlier work, the results of this study suggested several constructs which could usefully be featured in anti-speeding interventions. In the fourth study. research videos featuring each of those constructs were developed and tested. Results showed that at least two of the four videos made were successful in eliciting measureable attitude change. (A

This paper describes and summarises some of the work conducted over the last decade by the Driver... more This paper describes and summarises some of the work conducted over the last decade by the Driver Behaviour Research Group at the University of Manchester. The paper begins by identifying the most accident involved driver groups. It then outlines three aspects involved in being socialised into becoming a member of the driving community: (1) the technical mastery phase; (2) the reading the road phase; and (3) the expressive phase. Concentrating on the third phase the group has worked with drivers' lapses, errors and violations. A number of large scale, national surveys have been carried out in England asking drivers how often they experience certain driving manoeuvres. Based on the results it is found that violations, no errors or lapses, goes with crash involvement. "High violators" are not only more likely to run into others, but to put themselves in situations where others run into them. Then these "High violators" are characterised using Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour. For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD E201756.

Accident Analysis & Prevention, Apr 1, 1992

Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour was used to measure the attitudes and intentions of a large s... more Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour was used to measure the attitudes and intentions of a large stratified sample of drivers (Iv = 881) towards four driving violations. Measures were taken of respondents' attitudes to four imaginary scenarios depicting their commission of the four violations concerned. Demographic subgroups of drivers within the sample were differentiated on the basis of their beliefs about and evaluations of their commission of the violations. We were able to identify attitude items differentiating the younger, statistically more "accident liable" drivers in the sampIe from their older, and statistically safer counterparts. The implications of using this approach to inform future road safety campaigns are discussed.

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1996

This study builds on previous theory of planned behavior (TPB) studies in which we identified the... more This study builds on previous theory of planned behavior (TPB) studies in which we identified the beliefs and values which predict intention to commit driving violations. Four short experimental videos were developed in order to assess the effectiveness of an intervention grounded in the TPB. Three of the videos featured the major constructs of the TPB model. The fourth video featured anticipated regret, an addition to the TPB model which had previously been shown to add significantly to its predictive performance (Parker, Manstead, & Stradling, 1995). Results indicated that two of the videos brought about statistically significant belief changes with respect to scores on TPB items, and significant changes in general attitudes toward speeding. Discussion centers on the problems encountered in operationalizing the TPB constructs and on the potential of theory-based interventions to induce attitude change.

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Jul 1, 1997

Increasing support for the relationship between road traffic violations and accident liability ha... more Increasing support for the relationship between road traffic violations and accident liability has led to research focusing on the motivational factors that promote these behaviors. In Study I , a large sample of young (17-40 years) drivers were asked to complete the Driver Behavior Questionnaire (DBQ; Parker, Reason, Manstead, & Stradling, 1995). Factor analysis revealed 3 factors: errors, highway code violations, and more interpersonally aggressive violations. In Study 2, a smaller sample of drivers was recruited (17-70 years) to investigate further this distinction between different types of violation and also the role of affect in predicting behavior. Factor analysis of a modified DBQ revealed 3 types of violation. Measures of positive affect were found to be good predictors of all 3 violation types. Discussion focuses on social psychological and applied implications.

The Ageing Driver Project commenced in August 1997 and will reach completion in August 2000. Disc... more The Ageing Driver Project commenced in August 1997 and will reach completion in August 2000. Discussion in this paper centres upon data collection from volunteers aged fifty years and over by questionnaires, behavioural experiments and on-road driving assessment. A subset of drivers who completed the questionnaire will complete the test battery. The aim of this phase of the research is to obtain the best possible tests of cognitive, sensory and motor performance to predict on road competence of older motorists. A subset of individuals who have completed the test battery will be selected to complete an on-road test drive. A standardised route will be selected to feature a variety of situations which are known to be challenging for older drivers. Situations will be chosen which either feature highly in accident statistics or have been highlighted in the ageing driver questionnaire as being particularly problematic. Assessment will be carried out by driving instructors trained in administration of the standardised test. A good standard of inter-rater reliability will be sought through adequate training and testing of the assessors. The on-road testing component of the study allows comparisons to be made with test battery performance (objective yet abstract testing) and questionnaire response (a form of self-report of driving skills). The ageing driver research programme is borne of a need to appreciate more fully the implications of the ageing process and its effects on driving skill. It is unique in the numbers of participants involved, its scope of issues investigated and the multiple methods of research to be applied. Over the course of the next few years significant and important findings should be produced. (A) For the covering abstract see IRRD 492593.

British Journal of Psychology, Aug 1, 1990

APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser c... more APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser configuration. - alerts user that their session is about to expire - display, print, save, export, and email selected records - get My ...